The literature on peace operations has been dominated by case studies and by efforts to glean policy-relevant lessons in order to improve ongoing or future peacekeeping operations. More explicitly theoretical studies that seek to embed such interventions within the broader debates in international relations or comparative politics are more recent and less developed. Peace Operations and Global Order contributes to these debates by bringing insights from critical theory that raise new questions about how peace operations and the post–Cold War international system shape one another.

This critical theory approach seeks to challenge the assumptions that underlie the prevailing global order by investigating the interests that are served by current international institutions, norms, and practices, including peacekeeping and other peace support operations. It joins Roland Paris's At War's End: Building Peace after Civil Conflict (2004) in arguing that postconflict peacebuilding is concerned with the maintenance and reproduction of a particular neoliberal type of international order and builds on the more far-reaching examination of globalization and conflict in Mark Duffield's Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Security and Development (2001). The contributors contrast critical theory approaches from “problem-solving” or managerialist approaches that accept the liberal order as a given and conflict as an aberration. Unlike problem-solving frameworks, critical perspectives investigate how interventions may serve the interests of the interveners more than the recipients, and how peacekeeping is part of a larger set of international policies that may generate as well as resolve conflict. Rather than accepting peace operations as discrete activities in response to empirical events, this collection asks how intervening states and agencies are implicated in the very creation of these crises.

The editors' introduction positions this volume in the larger debates on peacekeeping, United Nations reform, and new concepts of sovereignty. Part I includes chapters by Alex J. Bellamy and Michael Pugh that argue that critical approaches can both expose the persistence of injustices sustained by the current global order and uncover the potential for structural transformation. The nature of the neoliberal peace and the experiences of those that are the object of peacekeeping (those who are peace-kept) are the focus of Oliver P. Richmond's contribution. He suggests that a “peace-as-governance” consensus exists within the United Nations based on neoliberal assumptions about states, democracy, and markets that are rarely questioned. This New York consensus may promote stability at the expense of justice.

Part II of the collection broadens the discussion of peacekeeping and includes chapters on specific themes and cases. Paul Williams draws on the cases of Rwanda and Sierra Leone to consider how international financial institutions contribute to conflict that then is managed by peace operations. Tarja Väyrynen analyzes the UN discourse on gender and peace operations to assess whether commitments to mainstream gender have been met. Roland Bleiker discusses whether human security is a better starting point than the state to create new ways of resolving conflict in Korea through nonstate interactions, and Eli Samnes uses critical security studies concepts to analyze the UN preventive deployment in Macedonia. The Bleiker piece seems somewhat out of place, while Williams and Väyrynen demonstrate that looking beyond a narrow focus on the peace operation itself provides us with additional insights. Bellamy and Williams's concluding essay engages the debates about the reform of UN peacekeeping and proposals relating to privatized peace operations and regionalized peace operations in particular.

The literature on the relationship between multilateral intervention and international relations has been shaped in part by the most important cases in the news and the most prominent reform proposals under debate at the time of writing. Famine in the Horn of Africa, humanitarian intervention in Somalia, the multiple failures of Rwanda, the prolonged crises in the Balkans, wars seemingly driven by greed in West Africa, and now the consequences of preemptive intervention in Iraq have each generated important insights regarding how international order and multilateral intervention relate.

The chapters in this volume were originally published as a special issue of International Peacekeeping (Spring 2004), and some were presented at conferences in 2002. Kosovo and the Balkans, therefore, are the touchstone cases referenced here, and major reports of the early 2000s on reforming international organizations and norms are the focus of critical analysis. Bellamy and Williams's concluding essay critiques the Brahimi Report (2000), while David Chandler's contribution explicitly focuses on the study by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (2001). The rapidly changing debates on multilateral intervention and global order today are shaped with reference to terrorism, preemptive war, Iraq, and the new thinking represented by the UN Secretary General's High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change report, A More Secure World (2004).

This rapidly changing terrain leaves some of these contributions out of sync with current reference points. Despite this, the importance of the underlying arguments calling for a more theoretically informed and rigorous investigation of the relationships between peace operations and international relations remains. This volume makes its contribution by questioning how assumptions embedded within policies and practices of multilateral peace operations often serve the existing global order and by proposing a theoretical framework for analyzing peace operations within a broader context of international relations.